Saturday, September 3, 2016

#58 - Saturday, September 3, 2016

It was Members Night, and there were tons of people there!  Including some potential new members.  Lots of yummy food (picnic theme).  Lots of scopes set up.   In the morning, club member Jim set up his refractor with a Mylar solar filter and a H-alpha filter, and I got my first look at the sun!  It was amazing.  I could see the prominences, a few sun spots, even the granularity!  It was awesome.  There was one time in third grade, at my second Girl Scout Day Camp in 2000 when the theme was space, that someone had a solar scope out at the camp.  I was at the back of the line, though, and I didn’t get to look through it.  Well, sixteen years later, I finally got my chance!  I need to image it at some point.

My first target of the evening was the Trifid Nebula, M20 – I want to get those summertime Milky Way nebulae before they start setting too early.  I was able to do 3-minute long images on it, so awesome! 
M20 Trifid Nebula, Nikon D5300 on my C11, f/6.3 focal reducer, Orion Skyglow filter
Guiding: QHY5 on my Orion ST-80
8x180s, ISO-1600, no dark (forgot)
[As you can see, I wasn't very good for correcting out the blue tinge from the light pollution filter yet.]

Next, I did the Eagle Nebula again, and did 5-minute images.  It looked awesome!  
 M16 Eagle Nebula, Nikon D5300 on my C11, f/6.3 focal reducer, Orion Skyglow filter
Guiding: QHY5 on my Orion ST-80
8x300s, ISO-3200
[GAZE UPON ITS GLORY.  GAZE UPON IT!!]

Next, I went back to the Bubble Nebula.  The minimum time I need to even see it a little bit is like a minute or two.  I did 10-minute exposures!  However, I guess my guiding rig isn’t quite optimized yet – most of my 10-minute exposures had drift.  Here’s a single frame though:
Bubble Nebula, Nikon D5300 on my C11, f/6.3 focal reducer, Orion Skyglow filter
Guiding: QHY5 on my Orion ST-80
Single frame, unprocessed; 600s, ISO-1600

From there, I decided I needed to get some galaxy photos – I haven’t done one in a while.  I had the Deer Lick Group on my list, centered on NGC 7331, so that was my next stop.  It’s a cool-looking galaxy, and I can just see five other galaxies in the frame.  There is a trio of larger (smaller than 7331 but larger than the other five), more interesting galaxies down and to the right of where I had my frame centered, so I’ll try for those next time.
Deer Lick Cluster (centered on NGC 7331), Nikon D5300 on my C11, f/6.3 focal reducer, Orion Skyglow filter
Guiding: QHY5 on my Orion ST-80
8x300s, ISO-3200

While my Deer Lick ones were going, one of the club members had his large Dobsonian telescope set up, and he was checking out different targets in the eastern sky.  By about 3:45 AM, the eastern sky had gotten quite dark – there were a lot of stars, and it was beautiful.  Unfortunately, we were battling dew pretty hard by that point in the night, so we weren’t able to see much.  It was still fun to look through, though.

The long-exposure stuff is awesome, but it takes soooo much longer to capture.  I can take 50x30s exposures in a half hour, whereas it takes nearly an hour to get 10x300s exposures.  And then comes the issue of darks – I usually take those at the end of a session, but with all of the different exposure times and ISOs I did, it was going to take three hours to take all the darks!  And I need to find a way to sequence them!  BackyardNikon worked for a while, but then when I closed and re-opened it, it wanted the internet to verify my trial status, and it said it had been deactivated.  Rawr.   I used the trial originally when I had the D3100, only to find out it didn’t talk to it at all.  I’ll send them an email to see if they’ll let me have a second go.  I did have a Sequence Generator Pro trial too though, so I set up a sequence like at 4:30 AM when I was tired and grumpy.  When I checked on how it went the next morning, it had stopped partway through – camera battery had died.  It only lasts about 2.5 hours or so.  The sequence was going to take nearly four hours to get all the darks from last night and tonight.  It would have been too warm by the time it finished anyway.  So I couldn’t process all my images, only some.   On top of that, it took them in FITS format, and DSS threw a “fit” about them not matching with the light frames and wouldn’t stack.  So I need to figure out how to make it do raws.  There must be a way…


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